Top 5 Fridays! 5 Fundamental Points to Implementing Nutrition into Your Practice

Part of my focus for the past few years has been expanding my knowledge base outside of traditional PT practice. Nutrition has been a big focus and getting people to focus on lifestyle changes is a great way of helping patients with a health problem that also just happens to have a persistent pain state or continuous re-injury.

5 Fundamental Key Points to Implementing Nutrition in PT

1) Knowing that Nutrition Impacts Rehabilitation Outcomes, Risk of Developing Chronic Disease, and Quality of Life

Nutrition is essentially fuel, the energy and nutrients for the body to do work, to survive, and to recover. The quality of fuel intake will influence the body’s overall metabolic state and outcomes.

2) Nutritional Screening

At the bare minimum a screen must be performed. Identifying if your client/patient needs nutritional intervention or referral. If done right, this can be easily added to your traditional intake forms or merely be a conversation.

3) Client/Patient Medical History

If your client/patient has a poorly controlled medical condition, intervention may be beyond your skill set. You never want to provide nutritional intervention that targets a specific disease.

4) Scope of Practice (Physical Therapy & Dietetics/Nutrition)

Every state is unique when it comes to the depth of intervention you as a physical therapist/physical therapist assistant can provide. If you are unsure, contact your state PT board or association for clarification and visit NutritionAdvocacy.org for nutritional laws.

5)Personal Scope of Practice (Knowledge & Comfort)

To speak on nutrition, you need to have a baseline knowledge of the essentials and stay current with the latest in high quality evidence. You also need to be comfortable addressing the multitude of factors that affect an individual’s eating pattern (beliefs, culture, preferences, socioeconomic status, etc.).

Plus bonus 6th key point! If you are uncomfortable with this in a PT setting, knows the signs of when to refer out to a trusted RD or similar provider.

6) The Decision of Intervention or Referral

Taking into consider all of the key points above, will you as a healthcare provider give intervention yourself or refer to the appropriate professional?

via Dr. Patrick Berner, PT, DPT, RDN aka Fuel Physio

Interested? Check out Fuel Physio's Online Nutrition course! It includes a must have nutritional screen any clinician can implement for the clinical decision making for nutritional intervention.

Keeping it Eclectic...